Yo-Yo Ma, a virtuoso at more than the cello - The Washington Post Yo-Yo Ma, a virtuoso at more than the cello The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! By Philip Kennicott December 2, 2011 Follow @PhilipKennicott He may be the greatest cellist in the world and, some would argue, the greatest cellist ever. Legendary players such as Pablo Casals, Jacqueline du Préand Mstislav Rostropovich , have all left indelible marks. Casals was the trailblazer with the passionate commitment to human dignity. Du Préwas a tragic and beloved figure, a player of extraordinary drama and charisma. Rostropovich helped build the instrument’s modern repertoire, inspiring or premiering works by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and a host of others.

But Yo-Yo Ma consolidated everything that came before, made it look effortless, and somehow found time to go past the cello and refashion himself into something bigger. He has invented a term for what he does, though he is too modest to apply it to himself except as a goal. He is the consummate “citizen musician.” His people say he lives out of a suitcase, and it’s easy to believe. Ma performs around the world, playing the Dvorak cello concerto in Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Kansas City in a typical stretch of several weeks. He has recorded more than 75 albums, with Grammy Award wins almost an annual occurrence (five for chamber music, four for crossover and multiple wins as a soloist). The Kennedy Center Honors is only one item on a very long list, including the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, the National Medal of Arts, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom just last year. Few artists today can guarantee a sellout crowd, which means that orchestras and concert presenters rely increasingly on a handful of super-musicians with enormous name recognition and audience loyalty. Ma is one of them.

But more than anything else, Ma is renowned for never giving a second-rate performance, never being off his game, never phoning it in. If there are bad reviews of a Ma concert out there, they assuredly read like Mark Twain’s grumpy and ironic description of opera: “It’s too generous.” Go to YouTube and watch him perform Saint-Saens’s “The Swan ,” one of the hoariest chestnuts of the repertoire. The music swells and subsides in long arcs, as if sung in one ecstatic breath. His bow never seems to run out of room, extending the sound seamlessly. His left hand rocks delicately on the strings, making the tone quiver like the voice of someone remembering a very sad story. He’s played it a hundred times, perhaps a thousand times or more. But every note of every phrase feels fresh and meaningful. Throughout it, Ma never looks at his instrument or at the music, which is all in his head. Instead, he focuses intently on Charles “Lil’ Buck” Riley, a street dancer from Memphis.

To the sounds of Ma’s cello, Riley twists on one foot, almost goes up on point, oozes across the floor as if skating on ice, and allows the undulations of Saint-Saens’s haunting melody to flow out to his finger tips and toes. The mesmerizing choreography is equally indebted to Michael Jackson and Anna Pavlova, the great ballerina for whom this was a signature piece. The video, filmed by Spike Jonze at a meeting of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (on which Ma serves), has had more than 1.5 million hits online. Damian Woetzel, a ballet dancer who is now head of the Aspen Institute’s arts programs and who has worked with Ma on education projects, can claim partial credit for the remarkable performance. When Woetzel first saw Lil’ Buck, he immediately thought of Ma and sent him a video of the young dancer. “And Yo-Yo said, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to do something,’ ” Woetzel says. This is how some of the strangest and most compelling collaborations in the music world have happened over the past few decades. Ma gets excited, and the magic happens. They recently performed it in China.

Only if you’ve been asleep for the past 20 years would it seem strange that a master cellist is accompanying a street dancer. In conversation, Ma doesn’t even use the word classical music, preferring to talk about “acoustic music.” Perhaps, when he recorded a Cole Porter album with Stephane Grappelli in 1989 or collaborated with Bobby McFerrin in 1992, people would call this kind of thing “crossover” work. But, in large part because of Ma’s insistence on continually crossing boundaries, those labels now seem to obscure more than they reveal. Ma has helped reinvent the way people think about classical music, expanding its audiences and its boundaries to the point that the only term that seems encompassing enough to describe what he does is the one he invented: citizen musician. Anthropological spirit Ma was born in 1955. His parents, musicians of Chinese descent, were living in Paris, and their son got started on the cello early. A few years after the family relocated to New York City, Ma began studying with Leonard Rose , a legendary teacher at the Juilliard School.

Ma was a prodigy and could have been gone on the road as a performer at an age when other kids go to college. But he made what turned out to be a critical choice. He postponed the musician’s itinerant life and went to Harvard, where he studied anthropology. “I think I knew that I needed to grow up,” he says. “I felt very immature. I think I needed to get away from home, leave the parental umbrella behind.” From then on, Ma, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., has been in some way a part of Harvard, and the best of Harvard — the spirit of excellence and inquiry — has always been a part of him. “I often will say to somebody that what you put in your mind before you are 21 is sort of like your intellectual, emotional bank account,” he says. “You will be drawing on that for the rest of your life.” In Ma’s case, he says, it was his study of anthropology that capitalized the brain account. It made him question where he came from, the assumptions of the people around him, and the way in which human beings form communities and webs of reliance. Anthropology became an ethos, an emotional attitude to the world that remains embedded in everything that Ma does.

Kathryn Stott , a pianist who has accompanied Ma in recitals for years, says she saw the anthropological mind in action when Ma first discovered the music of the late, great tango master Astor Piazzolla. “I’ll never forget him calling me at home to tell me about it,” she says. It was a transcontinental phone call, and a rarity for Ma to call her at home. “He said, ‘I am so excited I have discovered this music. It made me feel totally alive again. We have to play it.’ This was at a time when not many people knew about tango music and the revival of Piazzolla.” That discovery led to “Soul of the Tango,” an album of Piazzolla’s music, in 1997, by which time Ma’s annual output of recordings was as likely to include Appalachian folk music as Mozart or Bach. But Stott says the discovery of Piazzolla wasn’t just about some interesting new music. It changed the way they played. “That was a pivotal point,” she says. Piazzolla was being incorporated, in her playing and his, down to the intricate details of how they thought about rhythm.

If the anthropological spirit was first evident in an enormous appetite for all kinds of music, it has grown into the organizing principle of Ma’s career, which is filled with uncannily prescient projects. In the 1990s, Ma began a new look at the Bach cello suites, a monumental opus he had recorded brilliantly in 1983. That led to a series of 1997 films called “Inspired by Bach,” documenting his collaboration with artists outside of music, including filmmaker Atom Egoyan, choreographer Mark Morris and the ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean. In 1998, Ma started the Silk Road project to explore the diverse music and cultures of countries crossed by the ancient trade route. When he brought a group of 13 international musicians, the Silk Road Ensemble , to the Kennedy Center in October 2001, the United States had just begun its long-running war in Afghanistan, territory through which the ancient Silk Road passed. The Silk Road Ensemble has become an ongoing endeavor, and it has led to an increased engagement with public education. Ma has created Silk Road projects for schools around the country.

Ask him about indigo, the ancient dye that makes things blue, and you get a long disquisition on its history and how it can be used to help students relate to both the Silk Road, the blues and the jeans they’re wearing. And he is now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s creative consultant, heavily focused on working in the local school system. The goal, he says, is to make connections with kids, and to get more musicians thinking like “citizen musicians,” defining their mission more broadly than concerts and teaching. “Music doesn’t have to happen in concert halls,” he says. “It can happen anyplace, and it does serve a purpose.” He is participating in large performances created by and for children, in flash-mob concerts that materialize music in unexpected places, and in projects that bring local musicians into jails, colleges and elementary schools. “Yo-Yo is a connector,” says Deborah Rutter, the orchestra’s president. “He is a natural convener of people.” Passing the music on Ma insists that his educational work isn’t extracurricular, a distraction or addendum to the real work he does. It’s fundamental to the entire project of being Yo-Yo Ma.

“The most important thing I can do in a performance is make it memorable,” he says. “That is also the goal of learning.” Learning, he argues, isn’t about disposable knowledge, the stuff you cram in your head, but epiphanies of emotion and engagement that stay with you a lifetime. Which is exactly what he hopes happens on stage. There seem to be two fundamental drivers to this passion for connection and engagement. One is personal, the pleasure it gives him. The other is social, a deep concern about the direction of the society he lives in. Yet Ma is so fundamentally private and essentially optimistic, that he doesn’t talk about either of these motivations, beyond reiterating a basic maxim: “The more you put in, the more you get out.” When Ma’s former teacher Leonard Rose was sick with leukemia, Rose asked Ma to look after one of his brilliant young students, Matt Haimovitz . Ma did, and for years the two would meet on the road for informal lessons. “It was the two of us sitting on television sets and couches in hotel rooms,” Haimovitz remembers. The lessons, he says, “were more philosophical discussion” than traditional instruction on instrumental technique.

Haimovitz calls Ma “immense.” And he says the fundamental thing about collaborating with Ma is that “he always makes whoever works with him look good.” Rutter has seen the “the more in, the more out” philosophy in operation during innumerable performances. “When he is playing Elgar, he is drawing from the audience,” she says. “It is his connection to the people who are listening that is feeding him as much as he is feeding them.” Ma is careful never to articulate his larger concern about society as pessimism. Classical music may be in deep trouble, financially and culturally, as older audiences die off and younger people have a seemingly infinite number of entertainment options. But Ma doesn’t seem to worry about it. As one friend says, with him the glass isn’t half full, it’s full three times over. “You pick up a newspaper now and it isn’t very encouraging,” he says. “I’m aware of that. I’m glad I have a job. I’m grateful every day that I have that opportunity to be wanted and needed someplace.” Despair, cynicism, pessimism accomplish nothing. If anything, he is inclined to take on even larger, more intractable problems. Great music will survive.

What people need now is even more fundamental than music. For Ma it is almost a spiritual question: How can human beings engage more deeply, get more out of the world and their experience of it? There is a literacy at stake deeper than the ability to understand and respond to music. “I am less worried about ‘classical music’ than I am worried about general interpretive literacy,” he says. “Are we using ourselves maximally?” He is, certainly. Effortlessly, inexhaustibly and productively, the consummate citizen musician. See the rest of this year’s Kennedy Center Honorees: WHEN A VIRTUOSO AND HIS CELLO TAKE TO THE ROAD - NYTimes.com WHEN A VIRTUOSO AND HIS CELLO TAKE TO THE ROAD By BERNARD HOLLAND Published: May 24, 1981 Logan Airport, Boston. Destination Detroit. Flight attendant: ''Welcome aboard, sir. Wouldn't you like to check that object through?'' Yo-Yo Ma: ''Good morning. This is my cello, and I have a ticket for it and for myself.'' Flight attendant (eyes beginning to glaze with discomfort): ''I'll have to call my supervisor.'' Supervisor: ''Sir.

Wouldn't you like to put that in the baggage compartment?'' Yo-Yo Ma (smiling): ''Good morning. This is my cello. It's 250 years old. I have a ticket for it and for myself.'' Supervisor: ''Well, it will have to go in the front row against the bulkhead. That's the law.'' Yo-Yo Ma (smiling): Yes, I know. I've done this a thousand times.'' Mr. Ma places the cello upright on the floor against the window seat and with one deft gesture meshes the straps of his cello case with the seat belt. Supervisor: ''Sir. That has to go on the seat.'' Yo-Yo Ma (smiling). ''It can't. There isn't enough head room. Believe me. I know. I've done this a thousand times.'' Supervisor (acquiescing reluctantly and struggling to regain her professional smile): ''But you have to have a seat belt extension.'' Yo-Yo Ma: ''No. See how this works. I've done this a thousand times.'' ''A cello is a strange interruption for airline people,'' says Mr.

Ma, now settled in some 10 rows behind his instrument with his pianist and partner, Patricia Zander. (The cello has since been moved across the aisle to the bulkhead seats several feet forward of the original ones - this in accordance with federal law.) ''It disturbs the normal flow of their lives. The rules are either not uniform enough or the people on the planes don't know them in the first place. You get different reactions when you say how many times you have done it before. Sometimes they back off. Sometimes they get furious.'' Yo-Yo Ma, who at 25 may well be the most gifted young cellist alive, only smiles. He glides through these and other inelegances in his roving life with cheerful equanimity. He is patient in the face of impatience, calm in the face of turmoil, and temperate in the face of antagonism. In short, he is much as he plays - graceful, lyrical, thoughtful and generous. This is remarkable given his life as an itinerant virtuoso.

Contrary to an oft-imagined world of luxury, there are no limousines, hushed and beflowered dressing rooms, pampered diets or non-stop deference and adulation. This particular trip - an overnight outing to play at Bowling Green State University in Ohio - is, with its airline terminals, rented cars, roadside restaurants, intermittent harassments and nervous tension, a more realistic picture. The original itinerary plotted by his New York managers at ICM would have brought Mr. Ma from his home in Cambridge to nearby Logan airport for a flight to Detroit, a connecting flight to Toledo and then a rendezvous with Bowling Green officials for the short drive to the University. Mr. Ma has chosen a more strenuous but less complex alternative - namely to rent a car in Detroit, drive the two hours across southern Michigan and northern Ohio to the concert, and then to return by car to Detroit directly afterwards, spending a few brief hours at an airport hotel before flying early back to Boston the next morning. He hopes it will all go better than his travel plans to Baltimore the day before. ''I'm playing with the Baltimore Symphony in Europe soon,'' he explains, ''and since we can't rehearse on tour, I was to go down for the day.

Tickets for me and the cello were prepaid, but when I got to the airport the one for the cello wasn't there. It took me 25 minutes to straighten it out and by that time I had been bumped off of the flight. No flight. No rehearsal. I went back to Cambridge. It happens all the time. I was once on a western airline with two other cellists, Nathaniel Rosen and his wife, Jennifer Langham. We got on the plane but they tried to bump our instruments. You should have heard Nick Rosen yell. ''I used to be bothered and irritated by all this, and my wife, Jill, is still constantly horrified. After all, I'm paying for the cello. Why should I be treated as a criminal? When I fly the Eastern Airlines shuttle with no reserved seats, I try to come an hour early to get the front row bulkhead seats. If they are already occupied, I have to ask people if they mind moving. The airline people generally won't do it for me. Sometimes the passengers say no, and I have to get off the flight. Leonard Rose was once stopped at the door of the plane and asked what he was carrying.

He answered, 'This is an oboe, my dear.' The attendant looked it up on her list of acceptable items and happily waved him on board.'' Conductors can be as hazardous as the airlines, says Mr. Ma. ''I was in London not long ago finishing a series of concerts there and getting ready for three performances with Herbert von Karajan in Lucerne. All of a sudden Karajan calls in the middle of the night and schedules a rehearsal for 10 o'clock the next morning. You don't say no to Herbert von Karajan so I frantically chartered a small jet to Zurich and arranged for a car to Lucerne. When we landed, I found that Karajan had changed his mind and had cancelled the rehearsal. It cost me around $4,000. 1 Yo Yo Ma’s Instrument - Yo Yo Ma Net Worth Yo Yo Ma’s Instrument Read more... Yo Yo Ma Yo Yo Ma Net Worth is $12 Million. Yo Yo Ma was born in France and has an estimated net worth of $12 million dollars. A commercially and critically successful cellist and composer, Yo Yo Ma has been performing both classical and popular music for al. Yo-Yo Ma (born October 7, 19...

Yo Yo Ma Net Worth is $12 Million. Yo Yo Ma Net Worth is $12 Million. Yo Yo Ma was born in France and has an estimated net worth of $12 million dollars. A commercially and critically successful cellist and composer, Yo Yo Ma has been performing both classical and popular music for al Yo-Yo Ma is a French-born Chinese American cellist, virtuoso, and orchestral composer. He has received multiple Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts in 2001 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Ma is regarded by some as the most famous cellist of the modern age. Yo-Yo Ma was born in Paris on October 7, 1955, to Chinese parents and had a musical upbringing. His mother, Marina Lu, was a singer, and his father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, was a violinist and professor of music at Nanjing National Central University. His family moved to New York when he was five years old. At a very young age, Ma began studying violin, and later viola, before settling on the cello in 1960 at age four.

According to Ma, his first choice was the double bass due to its large size, but he compromised and took up cello instead. The child prodigy began performing before audiences at age five, and performed for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was seven. At... Yo-Yo Ma Scoliosis | Hudson Valley Scoliosis Posted on May 4, 2013 by Dr. Andrew Strauss — No Comments ↓ Yo-Yo Ma – Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is a French-born American cellist, virtuoso, orchestral composer. He was born in Paris in 1955 to Chinese parents. When he was four he began to study the cello with his father and moved with his family to New York. He was mentored by Leonard Rose at The Julliard School and graduated from Harvard University in 1976. Ma has received numerous awards; multiple Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts in 2001 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. He serves as a UN Messenger of Peace and as a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities.

He has performed for eight American presidents, most recently at the invitation of President Obama on the occasion of the 56th Inaugural Ceremony. Ma is one of the most famous cellists today and currently plays with his own Silk Road Ensemble, which has the goal of bringing together musicians from diverse countries all of which are historically linked via the Silk Road. He has also made appearances on “Arthur,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Sesame Street. When Yo-Yo Ma was 25 he had an operation for scoliosis, curvature of the spine , which was undoubtedly aggravated by playing the cello. "In one way, it was a most wonderful thing to go through, because you think about what's important--you may come out being able to play the cello but if not, you realize you can still go on and lead a productive life. Music also deals with life-and-death questions, sickness, overcoming tragedy.

So those things you've gone through add to your life experience and therefore your understanding of the music, and there's more depth to your communicating of the music." Ma was 24 and had developed a “s” curvature with one 63 degree curve and one 67 degree curve that reduced the volume and space in his lungs. He had avoided surgery because he didn’t want to halt his career for months of down time required by surgery. There are tremendous risks involved with spinal surgery as there are numerous nerves connected to the spinal that risk of being damaged. Most severe is the risk of PARALYSIS or DEATH.. “Jill (his wife) knew the risk before we were married, and she had faith in me even if it turned out that I couldn’t continue playing.” “I had to decide that there’s more to life than cello.” After surgery Ma had to be in a upper body cast for 6 months. “Playing any acoustic instrument in a large hall is strenuous. A lot of cellists end up with bad backs or tendonitis.

I do aerobics, lift weights, all that stuff to insulate against the short nights and cramped airplanes.” Sources: Yo-Yo Ma: A Biography By Jim Whiting (ch 7, pgs 57-60) & [ 1 , 2 ] ‘The Music of Strangers’ review: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble | Variety Courtesy of TIFF June 9, 2016 | 03:04PM PT A new documentary by Morgan Neville ('20 Feet from Stardom') looks at a group of one-world musicians who make a joyful noise. The fabled Oscar-winning documentary “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China” (1980), which followed Stern as he taught the children of Communist China to play — and love — Western classical music, captured a new kind of synergy between the West and the East.

In “The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble,” a documentary directed by Morgan Neville (who made the Oscar-winning “20 Feet from Stardom”), musicians from all over the world join the legendary cellist to form a virtuoso ragtag band, and they create a joyful noise — a percolating life force that’s equal parts klezmer and Bollywood, with maybe a hint of disco. The instrumentalists, who hail from Spain, Syria, Japan, Iran, and other nations, are so at home with global musical fusion that they might almost have been among the Chinese teenagers taught by Isaac Stern — and, in fact, one of them was (we see her in a clip with Stern from 1980). Her name is Wu Man, and she’s the world master of the pipa, a short-necked wooden lute that she plays like Jimmy Page unplugged. Wu is a traditionalist, devoted to an instrument of painstaking demand that stretches back to the third century. But she is also a free-form sound machine. “The Music of Strangers” is an aural celebration that’s about using the past to break free of boundaries.

Could it prove to be the kind of landmark musical documentary that “From Mao to Mozart” or “Buena Vista Social Club” was? Perhaps, but probably not, since the movie, despite enthralling moments, is so self-intoxicated by its blissed-out vision of global healing that it’s a little soft. The film has a marvelous focal point in Yo-Yo Ma, the superstar Chinese-American cellist — already a walking icon of international synergy — who serves as its host, hero, and grinning musical bard. We see Ma at age seven, in an extraordinary black-and-white clip, when he was introduced by Leonard Bernstein to perform at the White House for JFK and Jackie Kennedy. As a boy, he appears deeply serious, but he became an impish maestro, with a playful mockery that lets you know he doesn’t take life nearly as seriously as he does art. By the time he’d conquered the classical-music world, he was restless to let off steam and create something audacious. “The Music of Strangers” is about what he did, maybe to liberate his own classically rigorous soul.

In 2000, he began to pull together the Silk Road Ensemble, and from the very start they were totally improvising who they were and what they would sound like. Ma knew that he wanted musicians from a vast range of backgrounds and traditions, but what’s amazing is how well they mesh once the musical modes are laid on top of one another. It’s almost analogous to the way that Joseph Campbell demonstrated the spiritual links underlying disparate religious mythologies. Kinan Azmeh, the clarinetist from Syria, does furious solos that make him sound like he’s charming a snake at a wedding in a “Star Wars” movie, and Kayhan Kalhor, from Iran, is a master of the kamancheh, a small bowed instrument held on the knee, from which he pours out oodles of notes in a mystic trance. The ensemble has an Indian tabla player, a Chinese bamboo mouth-organ player, violinists and violists from the U.S.

and Italy, and a performer who is indisputably the group’s rock star: the Spanish bagpipe wizard Cristina Pato, a happy spitfire who twists and tames that familiar blaring tone until it becomes an aural light that she’s writing in the air with. A number of the musicians have pasts racked by violence and political turmoil, and Neville thumbnails their struggle. Kayhan, especially, is the film’s symbolic focal point: As a boy, he was sent away from Iran in the wake of the 1979 revolution, and then he came back, eager to make a home in Tehran, then he left again following the upheavals of 2009, and then tried to return to headline a concert, which was cancelled at the last minute for reasons of “security.” The theme of “The Music of Strangers” is that these children of oppression became brothers and sisters of joy, linked by the throbbing global heartbeat of music. But once Neville has chronicled the formation of the Silk Road Ensemble and laid out sketches of the musicians, there’s nowhere for the film to go.

“The Music of Strangers” has been put together with great dexterity (it’s vibrantly edited by Jason Zeldes and Helen Kearns), with Neville going for a version of the same triumph-over-adversity narrative he used in “20 Feet from Stardom,” where the backup singers emerged from the shadow of their obscurity — the result of racial pigeonholing — to sing into the spotlight. But as Neville demonstrated in his most recent film, the superb “Best of Enemies” (co-directed with Robert Gordon), which was about the William Buckley-Gore Vidal debates during the political conventions of 1968, adversity tends to be a lot more dramatic than the triumph over it. “The Music of Strangers” is a portrait of musical salvation that could have used more of an undertow. Where the movie could have gotten that — but didn’t — is from Yo-Yo Ma. Early on, there’s a terrific scene in which he’s introduced to give a speech by an MC who reels off his achievements, and Ma stands off-stage debunking every claim, suggesting that he’s a far more ambiguous — and doubt-riddled — person than the laudatory words suggest.

But the film gives us only a scant glimpse of the complicated human being beneath the smiling celebrity charm. Not that Ma ever seems less than real; he builds the Silk Road Ensemble right around his effusive, fun-loving core. But any artist this forceful has to have a few more layers to him. If “The Music of Strangers” had taken a deeper look at what makes Yo-Yo Ma tick, if might have been a memorable documentary instead of a movie that, for all its ebullient rock-of-the-ancients vibes, winds up having the ring of an infomercial for one-world utopia. Film Review: 'The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble' Reviewed at HBO, June 7, 2016. (In Toronto Film Festival.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 96 MIN. Production A The Orchard release of a Participant Media, Tremelo Productions, HBO Documentary Films, Silkroad, Humanities, JustFilms, Pershing Square Foundation, and The Orchard production. Produced by Caitrin Rogers. Executive producers, Laura Freid, Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyerman, Julie Goldman.

Co-executive producer, Cristin Canterbury Bagnall. Crew Directed by Morgan Neville; camera, Graham Willoughby; (color); editors, Jason Zeldes, Helen Kearns; music, the Silk Road Ensemble. Committee of 100 - A Virtuoso and His Technology A Virtuoso and His Technology Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Connecting Yo-Yo Ma with engineers in a Manhattan recording studio last week. By Seth Schiesel Published: September 30, 2004 ONE day in 1964, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, a musician recently immigrated from Paris, came home to his family's Manhattan apartment with an exotic find: a tape recorder by Norelco using a brand-new technology called the cassette. There was always music in the Ma household: radio, records and, not least, the cello played by the only son, 9-year-old Yo-Yo. But until then, there was no easy way for the prodigy to listen to himself after playing. Within a few years, he was regularly recording his rehearsals and performances. Listening and studying those primitive tapes improved his facility and tone.

But more broadly, they fostered his regard for audiences and his sheer ability to communicate through music. "The cassette tape recorder came in and that was a big thing, you know, a portable kind of device that actually might be able to record things in live situations,'' he recalled backstage last month at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Mass. "I have to say that I've learned that so much of what makes an acoustic performer do well is how well they know the spaces that they work in. "Now, the thing that is really hard to do, that I think may be one of the hardest things to do, is to be in one place and somewhere else at the same time, which means to be empathetic to another space other than your own. What I learned from hearing recordings from, let's say, a mike that was placed at 20 feet versus 60 feet away is it makes the tempo sound different. It makes what you think may have been the right speed to do something - it may be wrong by the time you go 60 feet away. You can only really know that when there's evidence.

And a tape recorder actually gives you that evidence.'' Childhood tape recorders may seem like a mundanity in the life of a renowned musician. But for Mr. Ma, who turns 49 next week, they were an early step in a life's journey defined by innovation. Along the way he has not only broken down musical barriers but also embraced the latest technologies to forge connections across barriers of time, geography and culture - even if he can't always find the charger for his iPod. Learning early lessons by hearing himself from the audience's perspective presaged his entire career. "There's just the physical ability to play the instrument; there's just no one better and probably no one as good,'' said Emanuel Ax, the pianist, who has been close friends with Mr. Ma since the early 1970's. "But one of the things that really distinguishes him from a lot of performers is that he really feels a connection with the audience and audiences are very important to him. You see people who are fantastic communicators, but they may not be at the very top of musical ability.

And you see great players who are maybe kind of withdrawn and they commune with the music and the audience is welcome to watch, but they're not as interested in communicating and being performers, as it were. And then you have Yo-Yo.'' So much was clear under the big top of Tanglewood's Koussevitzky Music Shed one Saturday evening last month. That Mr. Ma was the featured soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was traditional enough. But hanging over the musicians was a huge video screen, with smaller monitors flanking the stage, all operated by a technician with a Macintosh laptop computer sitting behind the percussion section. They were there for "The Map,'' a 2003 piece by Tan Dun that is described as a concerto for cello, video and orchestra. Over the last two months, Mr. Ma has spent most of his time with the Silk Road Project, a multidisciplinary collection of performing artists that he founded to connect the classical tradition of the West with the diverse Middle Eastern and Asian musical cultures along the historical caravan route. To create "The Map,'' Mr. Tan, the Chinese composer and conductor, journeyed through his native Hunan, videotaping traditional musicians.

Those clips, digitized on the Macintosh, were "played'' at Tanglewood along with the orchestra by Joseph Miller, the video technician. One of the most powerful moments of the piece has Mr. Ma playing in a sort of call-and-response with a soaring female singer on the video. Mr. Ma has played along with recordings in other projects, most notably with the "ghost'' of the tango master Astor Piazzolla. For Mr. Ma, such collaborations are no less vital than playing with a live person. In fact, the recordings become a lens across space and time through which otherwise impossible connections can be formed. When Mr. Ma was learning the classical cello repertoire, he tried to absorb the personal dynamics of composers - "who wrote it and why, '' as he put it. In the same way, Mr. Ma tries to use such a video or audio recording as a window into the soul of the person on the other side of the 1's and 0's. For him, that is the only way to create a true musical experience. "I sort of worked with that video, kind of getting a sense so that no matter what happens, I sort of know when she's going to come in.

I can get a sense of where her psychic dynamic is,'' he said. "You know that painting of God and Adam - you have, like, that finger. Technology made that moment really special, even though I've never met her. She's never met me. But we know of each other.'' As put by Mr. Tan: "The fantasy of Yo-Yo and I is that 500 years from now a symphony orchestra and cellist will play with this girl and they will have exactly the same feeling as we do today, across language, time, culture, place. The technology makes that possible.'' When he was a teenager studying at Juilliard,Mr. Ma graduated from cassette players. "I remember fooling around with reel-to-reel tape recorders, which was really interesting because you can play it forwards, you can splice it, you can do all kinds of things,'' he said. "That was kind of interesting in terms of not only sort of analyzing your own work but actually being able to hear distorted sound.'' Mr. Ma is certainly no techie, yet his comfort with the latest tools continues to reinforce his regard for the audience - in a concert hall or in a living room thousands of miles away. Last week, Mr.

Ma and musicians of the Silk Road Project recorded new material in Manhattan. Between takes on Thursday, the studio's Star Trek-like control booth bloomed with a mixture of Chinese, English and Japanese. Amid the gaggle, Mr. Ma could be found leaning in close to Steven Epstein, the producer, discussing elements of the music so subtle as to be recognizable to only the most sophisticated experts. "One of the things that makes Yo-Yo so special is his appreciation for the recording process,'' Mr. Epstein said. "He's always willing to explore the range of possibilities that are inherent in the latest technologies so that his musical intentions are captured as accurately as possible.'' In fact, Mr. Epstein said, when he worked with Sony on the latest version of digital recording technology a few years ago, he conducted one of the early tests with Mr. Ma. This week, Sony released Mr. Ma's latest album, "Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone," a collaboration with the Italian composer whose film work includes "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'' and "The Untouchables.'' The project will later include a hybrid CD-DVD incorporating short films by University of Southern California students inspired by Mr. Ma's and Mr.

Morricone's reinventions. Now, even beyond "The Map,'' Mr. Ma is encouraging the Silk Road Project to use modern technology to make obscure cultural traditions accessible to Western audiences. It was typical of the group's approach that when members of the project spent two weeks in residence at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., earlier this year, the group included Kojiro Umezaki, who plays the Japanese flute called the shakuhachi and is an instructor in music and new media at McGill University in Montreal. Along with Shane Shanahan, an American percussionist, and Wu Man, a master of the pipa, an upright Chinese lute, Mr. Umezaki came across an 18th-century Chinese scroll that depicted an Imperial voyage to China's south. Because the scroll is about 30 feet long, it can never all be displayed at once. Inspired, the group not only wrote a 30-minute musical piece but also digitized important sections of the scroll. At a performance at Carnegie Hall this month, those images were displayed in motion and in harmony with the music.

The spell was broken only when the big letters "DVD'' inadvertently appeared on the screen at the end, prompting knowing laughter from the audience. Also at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Ma's group gave the American debut of a new video and music collaboration with Rysbek Jumabaev, a master of what is known as Manas, the epic oral poem of the Kyrgyz people. "It's like 500,000 lines long,'' Mr. Ma said. "And nobody speaks Kyrgyz except in Kyrgyzstan, right? And so here's the question: how do you give the essence about that amazing tradition, that kind of world heritage material, to people who would like to see it? How do you get it through? Once again, film video footage, storytelling narrative.'' But just as technology can help preserve the world's musical and cultural heritage and make it relevant to modern audiences, Mr. Ma remains aware of technology's potential to dislocate, upend and homogenize cultures. When he says, "In Ulan Bator, pop music is really big,'' it is with equal parts wonder and wistfulness. Of course, globalization has its everyday benefits.

"Well, what's so great is that my cellphone worked in Kyrgyzstan,'' he said. Mr. Ma rarely uses a computer; most of his e-mail is printed out for him. (He also joked that he isn't allowed to carry a laptop because he is known to lose things.) But the cellphone is his real lifeline. "If he could implant a phone in his ear I think he would do it,'' Mr. Ax said, laughing. "He loves the idea that he can call now from anywhere. Like coming in from the airport he can call 15 people instead of just sitting there.'' Mr. Ma is a huge fan of the satellite television broadcasts he picks up overseas, but does not know the cable television provider at his home in Cambridge, Mass. The reel-to-reel players are gone. Now, he loves his iPod but confessed last month, "I can't find the charger.'' (Two weeks ago he said he had found out from his daughter where the charger was, but hadn't gotten his hands on it.) Ultimately, however, Mr. Ma hopes that music and the technology through which it is created and spread can help make the world a bit healthier.

For him, using modern technology to create musical and cultural connections is about spreading one simple message: "We've got to emotionally feel interdependent. Not codependent in the negative sense, but interdependent in the sense that everybody has strengths.'' "We actually do have to live in one world,'' he added, "and all of this technology is making it more essential that we have a way of thinking about a whole because we know that the alternative is disaster, is total, utter disaster.'' A periodic look at technology's impact on the work (and play) of leaders in many fields.

Question: Yo Yo Ma is a virtuoso on which instrument?
Answer: Cello